Growing Up

Recipe of the Week: Ground Turkey With Potatoes

Growing up, everyone always stressed how important it was to have kids at the right time. My grandmother would insist that it was blasphemous to have kids before the age of 25 and after the age of 30. Growing up, I didn’t see anything particularly wrong with this belief, and I still don’t. However, as anyone can imagine, having kids young, is harder than it seems.

I recently joined a program at Queens College called the Big Buddy Program. The Big Buddy Program pairs each participant to a young child between the ages of approximately 6-12. The “Big Buddy” would then take this same child out every Saturday between 9am-4pm. At a glance, the program is like a great way to change the life of a child, fulfill some volunteer work, and boost the resume. One thing I failed to understand? How incredibly exhausting it can be.

The past few weeks I passed out immediately upon entering my front door. Maybe it’s because my little buddy is only six, the youngest of the group. Maybe it’s because he’s extremely high energy. Or maybe it’s because he insists that all girls have cooties, and refuses to hold my hand. Regardless, this program has been one of the most tiring experiences I’ve been through.

But something happened last week that I did not expect. After a long day of chasing my little buddy around the Museum of Natural History, he voluntarily held my hand for the first time. It was probably the most rewarding moment of this entire experience. I realized then why I was doing the volunteer work in the first place. Although looking after my little buddy is draining work, and although he doesn’t always show it, I like to think that I am slowly gaining his friendship.

That being said, I doubt I’ll have kids until after I’m 60. They are beautiful bundles of joy, but they’re also little lunatics (overuse of alliteration not intended).

Now that I have less time than last semester, I’ll definitely be trying to make dishes that require even less effort than before, but still taste delicious. I present to you, a turkey and potato dish! Although it takes a little while to cook, it takes very little time to prepare.

Ingredients

-1 pound of ground turkey

-4 large potatoes peeled and diced

-1 jar of tomato/pasta sauce

-Salt/pepper to taste

-Grape-seed/vegetable oil to lightly oil pan

-2 cups of water

Step One: Defrost the one-pound of ground turkey. Once it is defrosted, lightly oil deep frying pan or pot and cook ground turkey until golden brown. Mix continuously to mash turkey into small bits.

Step Two: Peel and dice potatoes. Mix potatoes with ground turkey. Add pasta sauce and approximately two cups of water. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Step Three: Let turkey and potatoes cook in pot (with a cover) for approximately 45 minutes or until potatoes are soft. Serve and eat!

I hope you all are having a great semester. For those of you with midterms approaching, I wish you the best of luck. If there is a recipe you would like to see, post the dish, and I’ll try to make it. Until next week!